Posted
by
Zonk
on Friday December 22, 2006 @04:43AM
from the hard-to-tell-when-you're-going-a-hundred-mph dept.

GigaGamez is reporting that the humorously-named Bunnyfoot research company (which specializes in behavior studies), has found that in-game ads just don't work. Some games which featured semi-stationary areas (like NBA Live) ended up with ads sticking in the minds of players. Games like Project Gotham Racing 3 ended up with the players having a 0% retention rate for ads that whizzed past. From the press release: "These results demonstrate a significantly poor level of engagement with consumers and exposed an apparent weakness within games to efficiently capture consumer attention. Despite following the model of real world sports advertising, current methods are not optimizing consumer engagement and are failing to influence the consumer in any significant way, the key driver for any marketing campaign and its validation. 'These results reflect the industry's concern relating to brand value and return on investment. Understanding consumer interaction at a deeper level of analysis allows us to measure the value of advertising investment' said Alison Walton, Head of Visual Engagement."

There is room for advertising in-game and I would have thought it's fairly "no duh" that it won't work everywhere.

Well, advertisers aren't stupid obviously. They're not going to go insert advertisements into some first person shooter game.. that would just be silly. Imagine if you had a game like Battlefield 2 and you were running around and there were billboards for Coca Cola in the middle of the desert. How stupid would that be?